Trespassing: Because if It's Only a Misdemeanor, Why Not?

Over the weekend I did a little urban exploring with my friend Thiago. We were in Hunters Point, Queens, trying to follow the path of Newtown Creek (America's Dirtiest Waterway!). But as you can see, there's not a whole lot of easy public access to it. (There's even less now — since that map was made, the Queens-Midtown Expressway has added another rampart between the grid and the waterfront.)

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So we trespassed. This is not something I do with a whole lot of sangfroid, not after a decade of post-9/11 security freakouts by the authoritahs. Especially not when trespassing on Critical InfrastructureTM like train tracks, bridges, and wastewater treatment plants. But... nothing happened. A security guard at one point checked us out from his patrol car. But that was it in terms of our interaction with John Law. In fact, that was the only person we saw the whole afternoon until we leaned over a seawall and found ourselves face to face with a bearded dude on a sailboat. He had just arrived from Bermuda — a six-day trip, solo.

As for what we got out of the afternoon, not much tangible. We could have gathered a fine collection of discarded railroad spikes, I guess, and/or of beer bottles. We did neither. But we headed home with a sense of having reclaimed (or really claimed, since neither of us had been there before) a piece of New York that's officially off-limits and unofficially inaccessible. It felt like felony theft, but — a comforting thought — trespassing's just a misdemeanor. The risk is well worth the reward.